Nike Polos and Defects Leading to Recalls and Rework

The swoosh is hardly visible on television, so says Nike. (Photo from tennesseevalleynow.com)

I spend more words beating up on jersey, polo, and t-shirt manufacturers in my posts (see here, here, here, here, here, and here). Truth be told, they are organizations ripe with opportunities for improvement mainly because they see only the hard dollar savings from buying in mass quantities overseas and boating their merchandise over.

On Monday afternoon, we received a phone call from our Nike rep, demanding that we send back every gameday polo and pullover as soon as possible. Puzzled, we held off on sending them back until we received a more concrete explanation.

As it turns out, Nike applied their swooshes to the sleeves of their polos and pullovers, not the chest, meaning they were not visible during broadcasts.

According to the picture, the swoosh can be seen fine on the sleeve but the necessity of having the swoosh on the chest? Again, from Uni Watch:

There’s something delicious about the Swooshkateers being too incompetent to get their own branding right, of course. But that obscures the larger issue, which is this: Does it really matter whether the logo is on Saban’s sleeve or chest?

-snip-

The whole thing smacks of typical Nikean hubris.

Perhaps the quality issue could have been caught earlier had the apparel been manufactured stateside and gone through adequate quality checks? And did Nike make the specification that the polos and pullovers were to have a chest swoosh and it simply wasn’t done, or was it that a higher-up saw no chest swoosh and decided they wanted one to be there?